4 Ways Google Wants to Help Your Site’s Speed

Page Speed – Google has been talking about making speed a factor in search rankings. What does that mean for all of us? Well if there’s too much stuff on that front page of yours, you may take a knock by the Google search bots. When I say stuff I’m not really referring to text or copy. The big things that slow down your page’s load time are large scripts, large images and lots of little scripts all being called at the same time. There can only be so many simultaneous things loading on your page at once so if we limit or optimize those things your page loads faster.

Page Speed is a nifty little Firefox or IE extension that you install and can show you where your page is running into trouble or taking too long to load. This is similar to Y Slow for those of you already working on speed optimization for your site.

Google Ajax Libraries – This is a little trick I started using on sites a few months ago after seeing Steve Souder talk about speeding up sites at SXSW Interactive and after seeing it outlined in this post. Considering the fact that you can only load so many things from one server at a time, an easy way to get around this to load things from different servers. Sounds like an obvious idea and something that can easily be fixed by linking to other people’s files. Well, it’s not that easy – or it is that easy but it’s mostly a no-no. People generally don’t want you lining to content on their site. Google’s different though. They DO want you to link to their Ajax files because it helps speed up the internet.

Why on Earth would Google do this? The faster the internet is, the more pages you and I will visit. The more pages we visit, the more ads we might see. The more ads we see, the more money Google makes. Really this is true of most of the ideas provided by Google here. Speed is necessary for Google to get more eyeballs on their stuff and it’s worth it to them to give away the tools necessary to facilitate more speed.

New Asynchronous Analytics Code – If you’re already using Google Analytics on your website you know what this and all the data it provides. Besides being free, Analytics ties directly into your Google AdWords account if you are doing online marketing or ad buys with Google. If you don’t already know what it is, here’s the video overview. If you need this added to your site, just let us know.

If you already have Analytics, this new script speeds things up by making less requests to Google’s servers. Less requests means faster load times for your site. You do need to move this script higher than the previous one was placed, inside the </head> tag. Again, if you need help setting up this faster version, just send us an email and we’ll hook you up :)

Google DNS – Okay, this is a tricky one to explain. Everyone on the internet uses a DNS service whether we realize it or not. Your ISP at home typically provides this and some of the sketchier ones (Comcast, RCN for sure) redirect your searches to their version of a search page when you type an incorrect URL in the address bar. OpenDNS has provided a service for quite some time that gave users an alternate DNS to go through but they have been using a completely different search facility for those same incorrect URLS. Google has entered this field not so much to hijack incorrect URLs but to speed up the connections we’re trying to make. Do incorrect URLs go to Google’s search? Yep, but that’s what many of us use as a default anyway and your search preferences can be changed through your browser rather than through a third party site. See the link above to set this up. They even have a toll free number to walk you through the changes.

It’s all about speed this week for Google and I hope to see more efforts coming soon from them in other areas or possibly a CDN service that will allow us to host images or site files on Google servers to speed up our pages even more. I’m sure Google has some exciting things coming down the pipe for us.

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